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Written by: Jody Lowe and Pat Lowe | Lowe Group
This is big.
You’ve likely read and heard your fill of the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) not just in the world but in investment management.
But as public relations and digital marketing professionals, we need to weigh in on how we see AI—and specifically AI-powered search—radically shaking up opportunities for ETF and mutual fund companies, among others. We explain below but the short version? We’re optimistic and focused on the pivots that may be required to take full advantage.
The old order
Our collective job is to gain visibility for our clients.
In our 21 years as a PR agency, this has involved a certain set of activities for the Lowe Group. On behalf of our clients—leading financial firms—we routinely seek earned media interviews with the most prominent publishers and media companies. Barron’s, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and broadcast outlets such as CNBC, Bloomberg Radio and TV, and Fox Business are among the so-called “top tier” media well followed by financial professionals, and that’s where our clients want to be.
Historically, firms have been less eager to cultivate media relationships at lesser or lower tier publications.
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Historically, firms have been less eager to cultivate media relationships at lesser or lower tier publications. Few care to invest much time with bloggers or smaller-scale news organizations. The preference has been for the more exclusive, top tier media.
Our work has also included injecting those same firms into timely industry discussions in order to elevate the company and brand. This can be accomplished through thought leadership opportunities at conferences or placed articles in well-followed industry media. The hope is that these will be found when investment decision makers turn to Google and other search engines to begin their due diligence. Our clients’ presence on websites that rank high in Google searches lends credibility and/or can reinforce a buying decision.
While equally focused on visibility, the path has been less uniform for digital marketers at investment management firms. In fact, we’d go so far as to say that asset management digital marketing has underemployed certain pieces of the digital toolbox:
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Compared to B2C or even many B2B marketers, there’s been less energy invested in the proactive pursuit or even valuing of backlinks.
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While most firms rank for their brand and products, winning organic search for high value keywords has been a challenge. Powerful media sites dominate in those.
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When the bulk of content is largely investment team-authored it’s not easy to consistently pursue a keyword strategy.
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There still continues to be plenty of legacy content management systems supporting mutual fund/ETF websites that confound Google crawling.
The new “order”
Here’s why we’re optimistic about the prospects for investment firm visibility due to changes underway in how information is being searched for online.
If you’re familiar with AI searches done using ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, Gemini, etc. you know that you can start by asking a long question, include directions, and generally carry on a back and forth conversation. The response to your input is a narrative answer to your question, often accompanied by links to related web pages, images and videos. This is as opposed to Google search, which returns a series of links to a set of diverse web pages for you to continue your exploration.
The digital marketer has a mixed reaction to this:
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Yay, such a great time-saving experience for the user! and
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Wait, what now—AI search hits my site, lifts my content and combines it with others’ site content to generate a response? But what about my traffic, and all my plans to engage and track and pick up on signals of intent? I’m losing that?!
Navigational searches for brands and products are likely to continue to take place on Google (and that’s why we stress that you need to rank #1 for firm names, tickers, etc.).
But a shift is underway toward the more complete, more useful search experience. Leading the transition are professional information-gatherers that certainly include the media and likely also early adopting financial advisors and other investment professionals. The data below shows the dramatic growth in the leading engines. Not shown in this table provided by Semrush’ Spotlight is Perplexity.ai, whose monthly visits reached 82 million in August, according to Semrush.
Source: July 2023-June 2024, spotlightconf.com
Search engine optimization is still important—with 1.6 trillion annual searches as of June, Google may send your site traffic well into the future. But it’s time now to also focus on what’s being called generative engine optimization (GEO).
GEO is all about how your firm shows when users are searching about the firm, about the topics you seek to be authoritative on, about your people, etc.
Test it for yourself by asking an AI search engine a few questions. You may be surprised by what’s returned or by the websites providing the information being used to shape the answer. You’ll see lesser sites—but better optimized for a visiting AI bot—contributing to the response. Some of the information may come from recent earned media on well-regarded sites, but other sources may be non-media sites such as blogs or websites with names that are new to you.
The takeaway: The hurdle to gain presence on these sites is different and may be lower than what’s needed to rank high in Google search. That’s where opportunity may lie for visibility not dependent upon attention from top tier media or support from Google’s algorithm.
Do you expect your website to be among those cited in your test queries? It may be, if the site offers relevant content that’s properly structured and sufficiently accessible to be extracted by AI in its near-instantaneous sweep of the web. Bonus: if your site is included in the citations provided by many of the AI engines, you still have a chance of attracting traffic from searchers who want to dig deeper.
Visibility means showing up
With every passing day, online “visibility” increasingly means showing up on sites that AI search engines reach and base their synthesized responses on.
This points to the work that your PR team needs to do to broaden the set of “influential” or needle-moving websites you engage with. Have you scored a mention in the New York Times? Awesome, good for you! But it will have zero benefit on AI search because the Times blocks open AI crawlers. A mention on a message forum might do more for you in AI search. Today information posted on Reddit or another online investor forum submitted by an amateur investor could become the top source for an AI search about your product.
Let’s give credit where credit’s due: many influencers are very accomplished at attracting attention to themselves.
Let’s give credit where credit’s due: many influencers are very accomplished at attracting attention to themselves—and that includes their websites. It may be time for PR teams to rethink the priority they give to request for information or interviews from bloggers or investment networking sites. Investment firm thought leaders may need to be more open, as well.
For those of you responsible for the visibility of your firms’ websites, LG Digital has plenty of ideas. Even if your site isn’t crushing it in traditional search, there may be ways to become more of a factor in AI search.
Less than two years after ChatGPT was released to the mainstream on November 30, 2022, these are still early days. At the Lowe Group we’re keenly focused on how AI interprets investment communications—see our recent post on how AI summarizes mutual fund and ETF emails. We don’t pretend to know it all and wish we knew someone who did. But we’re certain that where and how people search and how those searches are satisfied has sweeping implications for firms like yours whose growth requires visibility.
Are you as intrigued by the possibilities as we are? Send us an email and let’s talk about what we can do, including PR, digital marketing, training and our Visibility Grader, which is a blend of old and new factors.
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